If you're active on TikTok you know that it's been quite an eventful few weeks on the app, as users wait to see what will become of it as the January 19 deadline for the proposed ban rapidly approaches.
But one potential solution that was floating around just might be worse than banning the app altogether, at least in the minds of many users: a purchase of the app by Elon Musk.
Rumors began swirling that Musk was in talks to buy the app the way he did Twitter, in order to fulfill the government's demands that TikTok either be sold by its Chinese parent ByteDance to an American company or go dark on the 19th.
But after the way Musk transformed Twitter, basically turning it into a cesspool of far-right propaganda and disinformation, TikTok users were not happy with this solution at all.
The news first emerged in a report from Bloomberg, which referenced TikTok and Chinese government officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity. But as the news began to circulate, the company was quick to shut the idea down.
Asked about it by HuffPost, a TikTok spokesperson was blunt and to the point:
“We can’t be expected to comment on pure fiction."
Still, there's no smoke without fire, and the fact that this rumor got started at all is...well, ominous.
The entire purported point of banning TikTok or forcing it to divest from ByteDance in the first was place was supposedly to protect American users' data from the Chinese government as a matter of national security.
Musk, along with incoming president Donald Trump, is a close ally of Chinese President Xi Jinping, so his purchase isn't exactly a solution. Unless, of course, data security isn't actually the government's real concern with TikTok, as many have speculated.
This speculation is mainly because the entire tech industry, including Elon Musk's X as well as Mark Zuckerberg's Meta products, harvest just as much if not more of Americans' data and sell it all over the place, including to foreign interests. But whatever!
In any case, social media users are definitely not on board with the idea of a Musk-owned TikTok, and have made that clearly known on Musk's own X platform.
The Supreme Court is currently weighing whether to uphold the TikTok ban or kill it on First Amendment grounds.
Senator Ed Markey has also introduced a bill that would extend the January 19 deadline by 270 days in order to buy time for a decision.
